In September four economists published the first large-scale count of what meetings cost. David Deming of Harvard and three colleagues at the Norwegian School of Economics surveyed more than 9,000 workers and matched their answers to Norway's wage and company records.
The average worker spends 4.7 hours a week in meetings. That is 12% of the working week and 14% of the wage bill, about NOK 88,000, or USD 9,000, per employee per year.
Then comes the finding few people expected. The firms that pay the most and earn the most spend more on meetings than the rest. If meetings were waste, the firms with the most expensive hours would have cut them first, and they have done the opposite.
I read this as a time-management problem, and a pointed one for any commercial leader who has been told to cancel the internal calendar and give the team its selling hours back.
The short version
Meetings take 12% of working hours and 14% of payroll, before preparation is counted.
The firms that pay and earn the most hold more of them.
The number of hours tells you little until you know what one hour carries.
What the study counted
The survey ran from May to July 2025. It sampled about 10,000 people working at least 20 hours a week, and roughly 90% answered. The final sample is 9,099 workers, each linked to official records of earnings, employers and company revenues.
The hours are unevenly spread. About 60% of workers attend meetings regularly, and for them the average is about 80 minutes every working day. Around 40% meet less than once a week. At the other end, 21% spend more than 8 hours a week in meetings. Managers attend far more often, and for longer, than the people who report to them.
Across the Norwegian economy the authors put the yearly cost at about NOK 230 billion, or USD 24 billion. They call that a lower bound, because it leaves out preparation, travel between locations, follow-up work and the cost of switching attention.
The paper gives no separate figure for B2B commercial teams. Service and sales workers appear as one of ten occupation groups, and the study covers one country.
What a meeting hour carries
The paper's explanation is learning. Workers who spend more time in meetings see faster wage growth: one standard deviation more in weekly meeting hours goes with a rise of 0.47 percentile points in annual wage rank. Meeting time predicted wage growth better than concentrated individual work, training, email or administration.
Workers in meeting-heavy firms also report learning more on the job, and time spent with more senior colleagues is the part tied to faster progress.
Take the smallest unit, one weekly pipeline review: eight people, one hour. In the first version, each person reads out numbers the CRM already holds. Eight hours are spent and nothing has moved.
In the second version, the manager takes one stalled deal and decides aloud what to do with it. Seven people hear how a senior person weighs a discount against a renewal date. Next time, two of them make that call themselves.
Both versions take the same hour and cost the same in payroll.
The cause sits in how the hours of leaders and teams are spent. When they are spent badly, the symptoms are work done twice and decisions that wait for the next call. The bill is what the hour should have produced, and I would price it at the margin those eight people would have earned, which is usually more than their salary for the hour.
The bill, in the company's own units
Take a commercial team of 40 people. At the study's average of 4.7 hours each, that is 188 hours a week in meetings, the full working week of five people. At NOK 88,000 a head, the year comes to NOK 3.52 million, about USD 360,000.
The head count is my placeholder. The rates are the study's, and they are Norwegian; yours will differ. A team with many managers will probably sit above the average.
"My sellers need fewer meetings, and a Norwegian survey proves nothing about sales." It proves nothing about sales, and I agree. It does remove the easy assumption that fewer is always better, which is the assumption most calendar clear-outs rest on.
What this does not establish
That meetings cause higher pay. The authors say so themselves: "Our results do not establish a causal return to meetings." Able and ambitious people may simply be invited to more of them. The wage data run from 2022 to 2023 and the survey is from 2025, so the link assumes that habits persist. What would settle it for you is a measurement of your own: which recurring meetings end with a decision, and which end with a recap.
One thing to try this week
- Monday. List every recurring internal meeting your commercial team holds, with its hours and the people in it.
- Wednesday. Mark each one: did the last session end with a decision that juniors heard being made?
- Friday. Keep the ones that did, and turn the read-outs into a written update.
Three questions to ask
What do meetings cost us in a year?
Roughly 14% of payroll if you resemble the firms in the study, before preparation and follow-up. Multiply your own meeting hours by your own loaded rates to check.
Should we cap meeting hours?
I would not start there. The study finds the best-paying firms above the average, so a cap may cut the hours that teach along with the hours that only report.
Which meetings should go first?
The ones where people read out what a system already shows. They cost the same per hour and pass on nothing a junior can use.
Sources: Deming, Løken, Willén and Xu, "Meetings", NBER Working Paper 35706, September 2026; Inc., 30 September 2026; The Business Times, 30 September 2026.
Your turn: which recurring meeting in your commercial team ends with a decision, and which with a recap? Write to me at cemgorer@kihonlabs.com, or answer on LinkedIn. I read every reply.